Challenge Issued to Promote Precision Medicine for the Underserved

To support President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative, the National Health IT Collaborative for the Underserved (NHIT Collaborative) offers a challenge to advance health equity through the development of digital health tools. Proposals are invited for tools that:

  • Address the precision medicine needs of people in underserved and medically underserved communities
  • Facilitate participation of people from underserved and medically underserved communities to the precision medicine cohort
  • Promote the use of open health platforms to expand the breadth, depth, and interoperability of digital health tools and associated data to support the national Precision Medicine Initiative

 

Challenge partners, including HIMSS, Mass. General Hospital/Partners HealthCare’s Medical Device Plug and Play Lab, Intel Corporation, Howard University College of Medicine, TracFone, Global City Teams Challenge, and ICE Alliance, will provide experts to mentor, collaborate, and provide technical assistance for entrepreneurs selected through the challenge as they envision, deploy, and potentially commercialize their solutions.

Announcing the challenge, NHIT Collaborative CEO Luis Belen said, “Ensuring that everyone, especially those in underserved communities, benefits from advances in precision medicine will accelerate progress toward health equity.” Julian Goldman, MD, medical director of biomedical engineering at Partners HealthCare and director of the MGH Medical Device Interoperability Program, also supported the challenge, saying, “Our team has been working to revolutionize improvements in healthcare safety and quality through integration of devices into systems. We look forward to working with challenge participants to share this insight and host them in our lab.”

More information and submission guidelines are available at www.pmichallenge.org.